News for Saturday February 27th 2010

hmm.. it’s my birthday.. woo-hoo, just another day, nothing special planned, just working..

In the news today we’ve got a lot of it from our friends and affiliates. As far as us, UPS dropped off the new Seagate 2TB SATA6 drive to me the other day, and I’m supposed to have a new netbook coming for review as well, and of course more USB3.0 stuff too.

Storage Related:

Kingston SSDNow V+ 128GB (SNVP325-S2/128GB) @ Bjorn3D

Suitable applications include power users, system builders, system integrators and demanding corporate environments where efficiency and performance are important. With the results we’ve seen from the drives, they would boast a performance gain for any system not running a solid state drive. http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1796

"The 256GB Toshiba HG2 Series drive that we benchmarked proved to be a solid performing mainstream SSD from our testing. The vast majority of file transfers in Windows are sequential read and write data moves and the HG2 had very respectable sequential speeds. For example in ATTO we were able to reach 241MB/s read and 177MB/s write. These are the types of speeds that we would expect for a mainstream SSD in 2010. The Toshiba HG2 Series of SSDs also supports TRIM, which is is critical in making sure your drive is performing at the top of its game…."

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G.Skill ECO DDR3-1600 (PC3 12800) Memory at Modders-Inc Summary: Everyone is talking about Triple Channel DDR3 as of lately but what about Dual Channel? Those of you that have taken the plunge into the new P55 platform know what I am talking about. Today we will be looking at a set of Dual Channel Memory Modules form G.Skill, the overclockers friend Articles URL: http://www.modders-inc.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=314

Western Digital recently began to ship a new series of Caviar hard drives that included the company’s Advanced Format technology. The new Caviar Green models are nearly identical to their standard brethren, but offer double the cache (64MB instead of 32MB at 1-2TB) and have a different model number. A WD10EARS is an Advanced Format drive; a WD10-EADS is a ‘normal’ drive. WD isn’t marketing Advanced Format much at the moment, but it’s important to understand what the technology is and how it works, particularly if you’re still running Windows XP…

RaidSonic Icy Box IB-318 and IB-250 USB 3.0 HDD Enclosures Video ReviewQUOTE:"It’s been some weeks since I last checked out a USB 3.0 product and that was early on in the game. Fast forward a little and in that time many motherboards have hit the market complete with USB 3.0 and it’s easier to find USB 3.0 PCI Express controller cards on the market, too. Our next USB 3.0 products to be put through the paces come by way of German company RaidSonic. They actually sent us their new Icy Box USB 3.0 products several weeks ago when USB 3.0 was first hitting the market, but with Christmas, New Year, CES, a holiday and Chinese New Year, things have been rather hectic. Today, though, we can tell you about these products for you folks who are interested in getting in touch with the speed advantage of USB 3.0 for your external storage needs."http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3156/raidsonic_icy_box_ib_318_and_ib_250_usb_3_0_hdd_enclosures_video_review/index.html

Quote: “Four years ago Corsair introduced the Flash Voyager USB drive, a USB drive that was practically indestructible. A Year after that they came out with the Flash Padlock, u USB drive that had a keypad on the front that allowed you to lock and unlock it to protect your data. It seems Corsair has put the two together and released the Flash Padlock 2, which is basically the Flash Voyager with the Padlock keypad on the front. So not only can you protect your data with a key code you get the awesome protection of the Flash Voyager design.

Quote:Many people have shied away from SSDs due to their somewhat limited storage capacity and high price for the drives. Spindle-based hard drives on the other hand have massive amounts of storage space but lack the performance of SSDs. SilverStone’s $50 HDDBoost looks to marry the best of both worlds by allowing us to seamlessly link a budget SSD to a hard drive for increased performance. However, does it work?

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Sans Digital Towerraid TR5UT(-B) @ TechwareLabs

Join us with our review of the Sans Digital Towerraid TR5UT(-B) which could be the storage answer you need for your small business, home, laptop, and desktop. With a capacity of up to 10TB of space you won’t run out of storage anytime soon. We show you the TR5UT(-B) inside and out and test its performance LINK: http://www.techwarelabs.com/sans-digital-towerraid-tr5ut-b/

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Kingston SSDNow V+ Series SNVP325-S2B 512GB Gen 2 Solid State DriveQUOTE:"Kingston Technology was very quick to jump on the solid state bandwagon. Their first offerings were more or less rebadged Intel products, but at the time Kingston chose the fastest drive we had ever seen and that strategy worked out well. Later Kingston chose to take what they learned from the Intel offerings and went to work on their own configurations. Right at the start Kingston showed promise as they finally were able to tame the Jmicron controller allowing for shudder free operation and then moving onto Samsung controllers in the V and V+ Series. At CES we had a chance to sit down with Kingston and learned about a new Toshiba controller that was set to power the new Second Generation V+ Series of products. Toshiba invented NAND Flash and they have the experience to not only make the controller, but also the flash that runs seamlessly with it. For over a year we heard about massive capacity solid state drives, but most of these have been concocted from two smaller drives sandwiched together with a low cost miniature RAID controller. This is not the case with the second gen V+ Series 512GB model we’re looking at today."- http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3147/kingston_ssdnow_v_series_snvp325_s2b_512gb_gen_2_solid_state_drive/index.html

While visiting Zalman at a few trade shows, I was introduced to their new stereoscopic 3d monitor: the Zalman Trimon 22-inch monitor. nVidia has been showing off their own solutions that use any regular monitor, so what makes this monitor different, and why would you want to buy one? I spoke with Richard Chung of Zalman, who gave me the lowdown on thi explained to me the differences between the Zalman monitor and nVidia’s 3d solution. For one, this 22-inch 3D LCD monitor is optmized for gaming purposes, supporting 3D and 2D realizations.

In the past we have reviewed several gaming mice and gaming surfaces from a company called Mionix. They are based out of Sweden with a good reputation in Europe for their gaming products and accessories. Now they are trying to establish themselves as an elite gaming peripheral company in the States. Today we will be looking at their first entry into the gaming audio market – the Keid 20. This headset is named after a star system and Mionix hopes this headset will shine as brightly as its namesake. The Keid 20 is an ergonomically designed gaming headset which features passive noise reduction and sound optimized for gaming. The ear cups are made with special memory foam that conforms to the shape of the user’s ears.

So let’s take a closer look at Mionix’s first foray into the gaming headset market. Let’s get started…….

While most motherboards come with great onboard sound, some of us feel it just isn’t enough. This is especially apparent in the so called ‘audiophile’ type of people. If you crave the most realistic sound then you just might fall into this category. The audio that comes with any motherboard is generally far from the best, but recently the quality has been improving. Almost all onboard sound is 24 bit, which is considered high quality. The ASUS Xonar D1 that we are reviewing today is also 24 bit but what makes it any better than onboard audio? The secret lies in the SNR (signal to noise ratio). Audio cards such as the Xonar D1 have a much better ratio when compared to onboard sound. According to Asus, the D1 has 35x cleaner audio quality than most motherboard audio. This of course does not apply to all motherboard audio, so you will find the occasional exception. Today we have a Asus P6X58D motherboard, which can be considered to have high end audio. Lets see if the D1 has enough to beat out the P6X58D’s onboard audio. http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1792

I’m back with another review of a product from our friends at Geeks.com. It’s one of many Kodak digital cameras on the market today, specifically it’s the EasyShare C713 7MP camera. The name Kodak is one that’s been around for a long time when it comes to camera, so one would think they know what they’re doing when it comes to photography right? This camera is your sort of basic point and shoot, it’s small and portable so you can take it with you easily. The pictures taken with it aren’t too bad for what it is. The 3x optical zoom works well but the digital zoom is lacking a bit though that’s normal for most any level of digital zooming. The C713 I got is a refurbished product, but it looks brand new, not a mark on it at all. So read on to learn a bit more about this camera…

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Roku XR Quote: Most people should have heard about the ease of use that the Netflix streaming service provides. One of the major components of this ease of use would be the set top boxes that provide the service on TVs. Roku was the original and is still the best way to get streaming Netflix to your TV, right now. Link: http://www.aselabs.com/articles.php?id=5623

Brief:With wireless N or 802.11n based networks becoming more and more popular these days, we take a look at what Airlive has to offer in this regard. In our review we take a close look at WN-300ARM-VPN ADSL modem & router, the WN-5000PCI – a 300 Mbit/s & MIMO equipped PCI card and the WN-200USB – an entry level 802.11n USB 2.0 device.

Brief:Soundgraph is well known for their LCD and VFD products in the majority of HTPC enclosures from virtually all major brand names out there. The new FingerVU series takes the control of the PC to the next level with a 4" or 7" inch, high-res, USB powered LCD touch screen at your finger tips.

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Mobile:

Laptop Buying Guide 2010 "When you have to jiggle the power connector just right to get your seven-year-old ThinkPad to wheeze to life, only to take 20 minutes to load a YouTube video, it s time to put the old beast out to pasture and start anew. But where do you begin in today s notebook market, which has expanded so much that portables now outsell desktops? With a buying guide, of course. Use this comprehensive buying guide to examine some of the key factors and specs to check when buying a new notebook computer." Link to the guide:http://www.digitaltrends.com/buying-guides/laptop-buying-guide-2010/

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Evercool FIT Laptop Cooler @ PCShopTalk

"High performance laptops and notebooks nowadays are hotter and hotter; they often need additional cooling. Evercool decided not to build another cooler which sits under the laptop; this way they developed a cooler which fits exactly at the exhaust ventilation holes. In the following review we will see if the product does bring any improvements compared to the stock cooling."

As luck would have it, I received my first Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet for Christmas, but I had no means to protect it. Well, that’s where the be.ez LA robe Tablet can come into play. You’ve got to protect that Wacom the same way you’d protect your laptop, right?

STORY: PowerA just announced their latest iPhone accessory, the iPhone Universal Remote Case. Much like the Red Eye and L5 you can control your IR based products just using the iPhone, that is assuming you’ve also downloaded the accompanying PowerA app. What makes it different from the competition is the form factor, a case that can always be attached to the phone no matter the scenario. The L5 on the other hand is rather impractical because it’s a small dongle that attached to the iPhone’s 30 pin connector and juts out, making it less than pocket friendly. The Red Eye on the other hand is stricken to one room, unless of course you buy additional boxes. But there is one downside to the PowerA iPhone Universal Remote Control; it’s a learning remote only, which means you’ll have to train or teach it each of your remote’s commands. It should be available starting today at Apple’s website for $60, which ain’t half bad.

Assorted Stuffs:

What OS, Windows 7 or Ubuntu? Why not use both! @ TechwareLabs

The ability to dual boot systems is nothing new but very rarely done anymore. You more than likely will never find a good enough reason or use for an average PC user to run two Operating Systems (OS). So then you might ask yourself, “Why am I showing you how to?” The answer is easy, to quote Sir Francis Bacon’s much used aphorism “knowledge is power “. I personally wasn’t very familiar with Ubuntu as an OS so I wanted to learn more. The cost of a second PC wasn’t justifiable, just to put a second OS on so that I could learn it for my own gain. So I went and researched how to install both of them on the same machine. LINK: http://www.techwarelabs.com/dual-boot-windows7-ubuntu/

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Why is Flash such a problem on the iPad?QUOTE:"Not that long ago Steve Jobs made a statement during an interview with the Wall Street Journal that if he allowed Flash to run on the iPad it would reduce the battery life down to 1.5 hours. Now, this is an interesting comment, especially coming from someone that has attacked Adobe on more than one occasion saying that no one should even use it. But what was Steve talking about? Is he saying that Flash is so inefficient that there is no way to get it working properly on a mobile device? Is he exposing (unintentionally) that the iPad’s hardware is not up to running Flash? Let’s take a look at some of the facts in the situation and see what we can find."http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/3155/why_is_flash_such_a_problem_on_the_ipad/index.html

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Another perspective on CPU value

In our grand Athlon II vs. Core i3 showdown article last week, we included performance-per-dollar graphs based on whole system prices. Those system prices were themselves derived from the rough cost of a middle-of-the-road PC—the kind your typical enthusiast might buy. What if you’re on a tight budget and really have to cut corners, though? We’ve whipped up another set of graphs, this time using prices from low-end components, in order to find out. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/18502

While the gaming landscape seems to have shifted toward consoles in recent years, many feel PCs are still where the action is. Naturally those looking to experience the hottest video games in all their glory will need the appropriate hardware powering their rigs. Besides adopting newer platforms, at some point, every gamer or hardware enthusiast worth their salt will upgrade or at least consider upgrading their graphics card.

Of course, going for the latest and greatest (read: fastest and most expensive) is not always an option. Having reviewed a wide variety of graphics cards as they were released in the past months, we’ve compiled a table with some of what we consider the best options at several price points between $90 and $200. Every product chosen can cope with the typical game on respectable settings.

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PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 "Anzhofen" Released @ Phoronix Direct Link: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14620Summary: "After releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 earlier this month and delivering the subsequent 2.4.1 update, we have now released PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 "Anzhofen" to the public. PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 makes it extremely easy to benchmark your computer on a completely standardized software stack from a Live DVD/USB environment."